The healer looks. He sees the old black pickup grind to a halt, the one brake light coming on, the woman hopping out the door, arms waving, the farmer leaning out the window waving. For the first time ever the healer is tempted to burn rubber and leave them smelling his getaway fumes, leave behind him unheard the story of their huge drooling son, prisoner of the basement, chained in the garage at the family reunions. But the faces of these two parents are lit like rays of sunshine with the knowledge that a modern messiah has chosen the road that borders their alfalfa patch as the place to receive His divine instructions.

The woman runs up to the side of the car and lays her hands on the fender as if she’d hold it to keep the car from leaving. Her beady eyes and panting breath and hopeless, eternal, hope-filled face tell the healer this woman has a task of such insurmountable proportions she’s scarce shared the secret of her problem with minister or preacher or parson, that this one’s so bad he can’t quit now. Holy cow. What pining cripple on his bed of moldy quilts with his palsied arms shaking lies waiting nearly forever for his release? What afflicted lamb has lain behind a curtain to be hidden from company all these years? Here, he sees, are the mother and the father, the suffering parents, here with their pain and their hope and their alfalfa patch and cows and fish ponds, their world struck askew by the birth or the affliction or the accident that befell their fallen one, with neither hope of redemption or cure available for what might be eating mothballs or masturbating in old dirty underwear and hiding it under his mother’s mattress to be discovered when the springs need turning, might be roaming the pastures by night creeping stealthily upon the female livestock.

“Healer,” the woman asks, “will you heal my child?”

He’s not coming, Flenco suddenly decides. In a burst of thought process too deep for her to understand, a mere scab on the broad scar of telepathy which man’s mind forgot to remember eons ago, she knows somehow that another emergency has detained him. She knows, too, that they must therefore go find him. She gets up and catches Mr. Redding under the armpits and drags him through the dust toward the truck, where now in large numbers on the other side of the café windows people stand gathered to track the proceedings and place wagers on the estimated time of arrival of Mr. Redding’s demise.